Francis Ford Coppola (1979)

I first saw Apocalypse Now in a cinema in Birmingham on the last Saturday of the 1970s.  What impressed me most at the time was the sense that you were experiencing the events on the screen as going on inside someone’s head as much as in the world outside it.  This is suggested almost explicitly at a very early stage:  there’s a shot of Captain Willard’s head, upside down; a residue of the images of inferno that preceded this shot share the screen with him.  Coppola holds onto the psychedelic quality of this moment throughout the film, as Willard journeys down the Nung River into Cambodian jungle to find the rogue Colonel Kurtz and ‘terminate his command’.  Apocalypse Now thus dramatises a bad trip in more ways than one and this aspect of the film remains its greatest strength more than thirty years on.   I don’t think I’d ever seen it all the way through in the meantime, although I remember our starting to watch it on television at least once.  The whole structure of the piece – Coppola’s imprisoning psychological approach as well as the physical scale of the imagery – demands that it be seen in the darkness of a film theatre.

The opening – accompanied by (The Doors’) ‘The End – is superb both in itself and in what it anticipates:  the disorienting, insistent clatter of the ceiling fan in Willard’s room in Saigon foreshadows the noise of helicopters that will recur more than once in what follows.  The fact that the drunk, hallucinating Willard, a senior special operations man, is already and evidently screwed up makes for a psychological point of departure very different from that of Marlow, the narrator of the Conrad novella from which Apocalypse Now derives.  Willard’s mind is in turmoil before the traumatising assignment which provides the film’s main narrative and this gets across the idea that the American psyche was already engulfed in the heart of darkness that was the Vietnam War (the events described are meant to take place in 1968 and 1969).   The following scenes, in which US military intelligence officers give Willard his mission to hunt down Kurtz, are tautly directed and played – G D Spradlin is especially good as the senior officer and Harrison Ford does well in the small role of Spradlin’s sidekick.  Coppola’s ability to convey naturalistically the underlying tension in an exchange like this one and to move easily between this style and more expressionist sequences means that Apocalypse Now virtually picks up where The Godfather part II, with its masterly balance of personally complex and socially insightful elements, left off.   You can’t help having expectations that are sky high, even if your memory’s telling you they’re going to be disappointed.

For cinema lovers of my generation, the real-life story of the making of Apocalypse Now – the overrun of the shooting schedule in 1976-77, the replacement of Harvey Keitel by Martin Sheen, Sheen’s heart attack-or-was-it, the marathon post-production between mid-1977 and the film’s release in cinemas two years later – is inextricably linked with the movie itself.  A sense of regret that the picture was not only a crazily ambitious attempt to make a masterpiece but that it took so much out of Coppola he was never quite the same again is part of what makes Apocalypse Now gripping.   There are enough passages of sustained brilliance to leave you in no doubt that this is, in parts, a great film.  Coppola handles the formidable logistics of the production while retaining a poetic sense; he brings off action sequences that have a visionary life as well as surpassing technical flair.   The attack by the US helicopters, scored by ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, is a genuinely thrilling sequence.  The use of Wagner here might seem to be Coppola trying to out-Kubrick Kubrick but the accompanying music is much more than an ironic counterpoint.   It’s not, in any case, merely imposed:  the psychopathological Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore orders one of his men to turn on the Wagner as their raid begins.  The rousing music gives Kilgore and his team a high – what’s especially good about Coppola’s use of it, in combination with the bravura film-making, is that we feel the adrenaline rush and the exhilaration of the bombing, at the same time as we’re appalled by Kilgore’s relentless destruction of people and their animals and their homes.  (And of course you’re reminded of the Nazis’ legendary identification with Wagner’s music.)   The helicopters return in the Playboy bunnies sequence, which reinforces the dream-cum-nightmare quality of what’s happening to the people on screen and the audience watching them.

Yet as Willard closes in on Kurtz the film slows down – and it doesn’t develop any kind of different or compensating momentum.  There are still vivid, startling passages – like the boat crew’s attack on a group of Vietnamese on a sampan – but Willard’s voiceover seems to get increasingly frequent, and makes Martin Sheen’s limitations more apparent.  He’s a good, conscientious actor and his boyish quality is occasionally touching.  But when he’s not staring bug-eyed into the camera he’s not particularly arresting (and, because of that, you get fed up with the bug-eyed stare).  Sheen is reasonably effective as a straight man to the assortment of more eccentric personalities with whom Willard comes into contact but you never feel that his character has any kind of authority, and he’s not a tall or physically imposing man.  Sheen is particularly disadvantaged in this respect by comparison with Robert Duvall as Kilgore.  Duvall is no giant either but he exudes a force of personality that makes you see why people don’t argue with Kilgore.  (As Willard says, ‘He was one of those guys you could just tell was going to survive all this’.)  When Willard says that the prospect of confronting Kurtz eclipses his fear, you don’t believe it.  And Sheen reads the narrative with more reverence than feeling.  He uses an expressionless voice that’s always an actor’s voice (just compare Sheen’s readings with the anomic power Robert De Niro gets into Travis Bickle’s narration of Taxi Driver).

In any case, the lines that Coppola and his co-writer John Milius give Willard are increasingly (and unnecessarily) forced attempts to draw out the meaning of the story – at odds with the fluency of the image-making and the sound design.  (The cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and the sound team, headed by Walter Murch, both won Oscars for their work.)  There’s some fine acting elsewhere in Apocalypse Now – from Duvall, cast triumphantly against type, and from Laurence Fishburne as the seventeen-year-old sailor ‘Mr Clean’ (Fishburne, who was just fourteen when shooting began in March 1976, is alleged to have lied about his age – you can see why Coppola was taken in).  Frederic Forrest as Hicks, a chef in peacetime, and Albert Hall, as the boat commander Phillips, are strong too.

Dennis Hopper, playing a hopped-up journalist-photographer who’s become part of Kurtz’s weird, gone-native jungle kingdom, gives the film an immediate jolt of life but rapidly becomes irritating.   The Hopper character quotes a line from ‘Prufrock’ and, as the climax of Apocalypse Now approaches, the material’s links to distinguished progenitors – Eliot as well as Conrad – seem more and more like shackles.  The repeated intoning of ‘The horror, the horror!’ comes across as mere melodramatic underlining.  All Eliot did was use the line from Heart of Darkness ‘Mistah Kurtz, he dead’ as an epigraph to ‘The Hollow Men’ yet The Golden Bough and From Ritual to Romance are Kurtz’s bedside reading (and look almost respectfully arranged on the set).  What’s more, there’s a strong feeling, in spite of the literary credentials of these connections, of Coppola’s going through the motions at this stage:  he has long ago in the film animated the madness of America’s involvement in Vietnam.  The combination of military routine, vicious will and cluelessness that propels much of the soldiers’ actions here is powerfully shocking.  The big finish – even though you understand why Coppola feels there has to be a big finish – seems entropic and, to a large extent, a tautology.

Except that, of course, just as Willard’s destination is Kurtz, so the audience has an appointment with Marlon Brando.  This was the part of Apocalypse Now that I now found very different.  I’d remembered Brando’s eventual appearance as part of the anti-climax, particularly the way in which the film seemed to grind to a halt around him.  This certainly became a tendency in his later years:  I remember reading an interview with John Gielgud even before I’d seen The Godfather in which he complained that Brando kept slowing things up.  The legendary status of Brando’s Don Corleone makes this almost hard to believe now but I think Gielgud was right – in spite of the greatness of much of what Brando did in The Godfather.   In Apocalypse Now Coppola delays Brando’s appearance endlessly:  even when Kurtz is on the screen, the director reveals the actor’s face in many increments.  Coppola treats Brando with excessive admiration:  a close-up of Kurtz washing his hands and face (which remains largely in shadow) has the quality of recording the private life of a holy man.    You can drive several trucks between Brando’s pauses.   And yet, because this is Brando, it’s one of his last substantial roles and he’s now dead, it’s impossible not to be compelled by him.   And he does some extraordinary things.  His reading of ‘The Hollow Men’ is beautifully judged (he doesn’t try to dominate the poem yet still manages to read it in some kind of character – as much as that’s possible with a conception like Kurtz).  Only an actor as daring and great as Brando would and could deliver Kurtz’s metaphysical pronouncements in such an understated yet expressive way.   Apocalypse Now is, as well as a bad trip, a long one and I got bored in the second half.  But Marlon Brando’s close-to-swansong is worth waiting many more than two hours for.

7 June 2011